A sale of Turkish howitzers to Azerbaijan seems to be back on after the German company that made the weapon's engine blocked the sale because of restrictions related to its frozen conflict with Armenia.

Deliveries of Turkey's T-155 howitzer to Azerbaijan will start next year, the cannon's manufacturer told Azerbaijan news agency APA. But it's not yet clear who will provide the engine, given that Germany refused. Much speculation has centered around Ukraine, but another interesting possibility is Japan. Last month, a Japanese newspaper reported that Turkey and Japan were cooperating on an engine for Turkey's Altay tank, which had the same Azerbaijan-export problem with the same German enginemaker, MTU.

"[The joint development of defense equipment] is one issue that will be discussed within the relationship between Japan and Turkey," Japan's Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said at a press conference last week, following which Japan's Asahi Shimbun reported, based on anonymous sources, that the cooperation being considered by Japan and Turkey involves a joint venture between Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and a Turkish company to manufacture engines for tanks....

“If Germany wanted to introduce limitations on Turkey's exports regarding the engine, then Turkey may have wished to cooperate with Japan,” Erdoğan Karakuş, a retired three-star general, told Today's Zaman. Noting that the costs of production for Altay would be too high for Turkey if Turkey cannot export the tank, he underlined that the “contribution of the Altay project to the local defense industry would also remain rather limited in such a case.”

Japan, however, also looks carefully at the possible users of its defense equipment, as does another potential Asian weapons provider to Azerbaijan, South Korea. (But they aren't bound by the formal restrictions that European nations are.) Japan is relatively new at the defense export business, and is currently working out its policies on arms sales. So will Japan decide that it's worth it to sell its engines to Turkey if they're going to end up in Azerbaijan? Relatedly: Does the Armenian lobby have a Tokyo branch?